BigPanda Survey Reveals the ‘State of Monitoring’ for 2017

Customer Experience Is King as the Agile IT Stack Grows and
Becomes Noisier and More Complex, While IT Must Do More with Less

February 28, 2017 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--BigPanda,
the Algorithmic Event Management Platform that transforms high volumes
of IT alerts into actionable insights, announced today the release of
its 2017 “State of Monitoring” report. The company’s annual survey is
designed to evaluate the current IT monitoring landscape, including a
review of the most popular tools for monitoring, deployment, and
ticketing/collaboration; the biggest challenges facing IT pros in the
upcoming year; and insights into monitoring strategy satisfaction and
performance.

“Companies everywhere are recognizing the crucial role that the digital
customer experience plays as a key competitive differentiator”

Conducted in December, 2016, the survey polled more than 1,500 IT
professionals across a wide range of industries, including telecom,
technology, the internet and electronics, finance and financial
services, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals, as well as education and
manufacturing. Respondents skewed towards larger enterprises, with 53
percent representing organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
Notably, team size demonstrated the opposite trend, with 43 percent of
respondents reporting a team of less than ten, indicating that IT
leaders are perhaps facing increased pressure to expand their capacity,
without increasing headcount. The survey results also noted a distinct
uptick in the reported frequency of both code and infrastructure change
versus 2016 and an increase in the adoption of DevOps principles and
methodologies – both for enterprises and SMBs. Key findings and
takeaways include:

IT Departments Under Pressure to “Do More with Less” – Feeling
the pain of the IT skills gap, IT leaders are struggling to keep their
teams staffed with qualified candidates, with 82 percent of
respondents stating that successfully staffing and retaining qualified
staff members is a key concern for 2017.

The IT Stack Gets More Complex: More Tools, More Moving Parts –
IT practitioners are relying on a growing number of tools to do their
job, as the underlying systems they must support grow more agile and
complex. According to survey findings, the average practitioner
currently uses six or seven tools on a regular basis, and more than
half of respondents reported plans to further expand their stack in
2017. This, paired with the fact that the frequency of both code and
infrastructure change is on the rise, points to the growing complexity
and noisiness of today’s IT systems. Across the board, the number of
respondents reporting daily or weekly code deployments increased,
while monthly and yearly deployments declined. Similarly for
infrastructure management, the number of respondents who reported that
their organization makes just a few changes per year sharply declined,
while all other response groups increased.

Effective Monitoring Becomes anImperative –
Implementing a defined monitoring strategy makes identification and
remediation of service disruptions easier, and organizations that
consider their monitoring to be strategic also are more likely to
build monitoring into code, agree that developers are actively
involved in supporting applications, and consider their organization
to be agile. A clear correlation exists between monitoring strategy
satisfaction and the volume of alerts that can be investigated and
resolved within 24 hours. However, despite the fact that 85 percent of
respondents agreed that a strategic monitoring process is important to
their organization, only half of the respondents reported that their
organization has a defined monitoring strategy in place, and just 13
percent are very satisfied with their approach to monitoring.

Customer Experience Reigns – For the second year in a row,
customer satisfaction far outranks all other performance metrics in
BigPanda’s survey. Customer satisfaction was cited as a KPI by 73
percent of the respondents, while the second most popular metric, SLA
compliance, was cited by just 45 percent, indicating the increased
role that the customer experience plays as a leading competitive
differentiator. Additionally, this data signals an important shift in
the way that IT performance is valued, reflecting a new focus on
outcomes more closely associated with business services.

The “State of Monitoring” survey also explored key concerns for IT
departments in 2017, with the leading topics being: suffering a security
breach (87 percent), suffering an outage or significant downtime (84
percent) and successfully staffing and retaining qualified staff members
(82 percent). In addition, 81 percent of respondents claimed that it is
a challenge to quickly remediate service disruptions, and 79 percent
cited a struggle with securing budget for the proper monitoring tools.

“Companies everywhere are recognizing the crucial role that the digital
customer experience plays as a key competitive differentiator,”
commented Assaf Resnick, CEO of BigPanda. “Digital customers have come
to expect constant availability and high quality of service as standard,
so the difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’ now lies in factors such as
usability, personalization, cross-platform support, and customer
service. As a result, we’re going to see IT performance increasingly
measured against the success of the business – a fact reflected by our
survey, with KPIs such as customer satisfaction and SLA compliance
taking the lead over metrics one might consider ‘traditional’ for IT,
such as MTTR and incident volume. This is why it is critical for IT
leaders to develop a future-proofed monitoring process that can
effectively scale with organizational growth and handle the increased
complexity and agility of modern IT systems.”